


The Incomplete and Inacurate Adventures of Merlin Emrys, Warlock

by Rascal Fury (cat_the_killer)



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future, Future Fic, Immortal Merlin (Merlin), Journals, Memory Loss, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Witch Trials
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:08:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28561782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cat_the_killer/pseuds/Rascal%20Fury
Summary: Maybe, just maybe, Arthur would soon rise again, for the world seemed to be just one catastrophe shy of its greatest need. Merlin believed he would know once Arthur returned. Never did it occur to him, that the King could walk past him on the street and he would not notice. But he did. In the end, Merlin never noticed that his old friend was back.
Kudos: 11





	The Incomplete and Inacurate Adventures of Merlin Emrys, Warlock

Not many realize it, but ageing is as much physical as it is mental. It is not just your body growing old, but your mind as well. Of course, most men are only concerned about their body getting older and frail and ultimately failing them. And it is surely a rather unpleasant thing to think about. Growing old and feeble, losing your strength and health, withering away until the Death reaches for you. It is the fear that makes people search for immortality.

The thing is that many would falsely assume, that being immortal means not ageing. That immortality frees you from growing old. They are wrong. 

The most curious is the fact that they ultimately will fail to realize this, even after achieving immortality. They might spend years, even their whole eternal life without noticing that, yes, though they look like the time did not touch a hair on their head they most certainly  _ did _ get older. After all, growing old is an inevitability. It is what shapes all of the beings into what they are. It is constant, and it ultimately changes the person. A decade by decade. A minute by minute. A second by second. One will not stay the same as they were a few moments ago. It is, ultimately, unmanageable. After all, it is our experiences and our memories that shape our personalities.

Sadly, growing old does not only include the gain of new memories, but also the loss of the old ones. This is one of the things of mental ageing, that numerous people only notice after it is already too late. Even the immortals. Especially the immortals. No wonder, they do view themselves as something everlasting, untouchable, not changing. You could hardly fault them, though. You too have probably always thought that there are simply things that you shall never forget. Do tell, what is the name of that boy that used to play with you when you were a child?

It took Merlin some seventy or so years after Arthur's death to notice the first tells. Unluckily, he was in the middle of something back then. 

It was a little girl with a high fever, a child of peasants from a small town. Her name was Eliza. Merlin tended to her for days. He did not dare to sleep, did not dare to leave her side for the fear she might pass away when he so much as blinked. At the time, it was decades since the last time he used magic, and he didn't plan on using it ever again. Not even to save the girl's life. He ought to salvage it with his medical knowledge, he decided. 

After hours sitting by her bed, his thoughts wandered as they often did. He reminisced about many things for many years. This time he thought of his dear friend from Ealdor. His friend who he played with as a child. Who saved his life and saved his prince's life. His dear friend, whose name he could not recall. 

Walt? Bill? Ben? It was at the tip of his tongue, yet it wouldn't come out. To think he would forget the name of his once best friend, the man who died for him. It distressed Merlin very much.

Ah! Will! William. Shame burnt Merlin's cheeks even though it did not take more than a couple of minutes to recall Will's name. He was not supposed to forget it in the first place! What kind of friend was he?

He couldn't dwell on it for very long for the girl began to breathe heavily, and all his worries redirected towards her.

Eliza recovered many days later, and by that time Merlin forgot all about that issue with Will's name. Too bad he didn't realize it back then, for in a couple of years he was to completely forget his name and face both.

The warlock visited the Lake of Avalon every now and then but preferred to avoid it. It just hurt too much to be reminded by his failures. It hurt so much that Merlin found excuses to keep himself busy and away from the places where his memories laid. After nearly two centuries he came to regret it dearly.

As he stumbled on the shores of the lake with tears in his eyes, he dropped to his knees, the name he was ready to shout frozen on his lips. It was just at the tip of his tongue, but when he opened his mouth to speak, his traitorous mind clouded it as it did the name of his childhood friend and his mother's face.

"Fran?" he spoke in the end, but as soon as it left his mouth, he knew it was wrong. Nevertheless, he had to try again.

"Frayde!" Closer, but still off.

"Frey..." not quite.

He almost had it, it was almost there. Just a little push, it was all he needed. Merlin opened his mouth once more, his whole body shaking now with restrained sobs. He couldn't do it! His memories were too elusive, his mind failed him. A heart wreaking sob sounded in the darkness of the night.

"Freya," a gentle voice suggested.

Merlin's head snapped toward the surface of a lake when a reflection of beauty with ebony hair was watching him with tenderness and sadness in her eyes.

"You have forgotten me," she accused him.

Another sob wreaked the warlock. "I'm sorry, Freya, I'm so very sorry."

"My dear Merlin, I'm so very sorry too. It is my deepest wish to be of any help to you. The memories are such fleeting things. They are so easily scattered, and once they do, one has very little hope of getting them back."

The warlock looked into her eyes, the eyes of the woman he loved, the ones he had not seen in centuries. The eyes he had forgotten. "Can you help me?"

The spirit of the lake gave him a pitiful look. "The time chips from mind just like water in river chips off the rocks it flows through. What is once lost cannot be returned. That is the curse of the immortals."

That was the curse of the greatest sorcerer to ever walk the earth.

After he spoke with Freya, Merlin bought many journals, candles, and bottles of ink, and excluded himself in a cave. And the warlock wrote. He wrote for months, for years. He wrote everything he could remember and anything that came to mind, desperate to have any piece of his memory to cling on. There were gaps and inconsistencies, but he made sure that the words he wrote would stay on the paper, waving and enchantment after an enchantment, ensuring the books would never be destroyed. That was the first time in two centuries he used his magic. Not to save another's life, not to help a soul in need but to preserve the last memories he had of his friends and home. And he swore to never use his magic again.

He made the cave his secret library, building bookshelves and filling them with hundreds of journals. Only those holding the memories of Arthur and Camelot were protected with magic, yet the warlock still hated to forget more of his life. He still rarely touched the ones that were not filled with the memories of the Once and the Future King.

Merlin still hated to stay in one place and he still loathed the lake. But where once he was tortured by the shadows of his past, now he was tormented by their absence. Travelling and socializing was the best cure for him, he found. Although he was torn for he found out that the more experiences, the quicker he forgot. It took years for him to return to the cave and archive his many journals. Sometimes he lost some of them, sometimes he threw some away in his rage, not wanting to remember the more painful times. Sometimes he did not bother writing at all. What was the point if he never read it? And there were times when he considered burning them all. To hell with his past. To hell with the king he no longer could remember. But then he opened one of the books and read about King Arthur. The fair and just king with kindness in his heart. He wondered whether he was really like that. He could no longer remember, he had only his books full of unreliable memories. Yet Merlin liked to think he did not romanticise him.

Throughout the years he did and was many things. He was a healer and a soldier. A rich man and a beggar. A servant and a scholar. He even became a tree for a half of century. He briefly considered becoming a horse after that but decided nothing would compare to the experience of being able to photosynthesize (even though he had no idea what exactly it was at the time) and rejected the idea. He carefully wrote down all he could remember of this peculiar experience and placed the journal strategically beside the one filled with memories of sir Lancelot so he would be sure to reach for it from time to time.

Merlin had just a vague recollection of how much time had passed by when he decided to spend nice few years in a little town in France as a bookseller and an occasional dabbler in alchemy. He also made sure to be known to the townsfolk as that obnoxious old man with crazy stories. That let to him becoming the favourite old fool of the children. Merlin didn't mind, not really. He enjoyed being excentric and bringing smiles upon the little ones' faces. He came to regret it though.

He was not in the town even a year when a young woman came to his shop, a journal in her hand and her eyes cautiously watching his every move.

"Merlin?" she asked.

The warlock was floored. He stood in place, wondering how did she come to know his real name. Then he noticed Essie, a little girl that often came to visit him, clung to the woman's skirt.

The woman's name was Alys and to Merlin's utter disbelief, he had met her before. Almost 4 centuries ago. He inspected the old pages of the journal as she spoke, his eyes skimming through the story on one of the pages she pointed out. It was the story from Camelot, worded in the very same way as in his own journal. It was also the story he had told the town children just the day prior. Essie told it to her mother, and Alys recognized it.

"It was you who advised me to write my memories down," the immortal woman told him, excitement in her eyes. Merlin was hesitant. Meeting another immortal was not exactly unimportant. Yet, he had not known about her existence at all. He would no doubt ensure not to forget something of such importance. Unless...

Unless he had not wanted to remember her.

He had not gotten rid of Alys for months. Te woman stack herself to him as a leech, desperate for a closeness only another being not touched by the flow of time could offer. One morning she came to him with tears in her eyes, begging him to help her. Her husband, ignorant of her immortality, started nursing suspicions about her never-changing body. She feared his questions, feared him finding the truth and wanted Merlin to help her and her children escape to Britain. For whatever reason, he indulged her. In the end, it proved to be fatal to her children.

Merlin offered no consolations to her when they watched the children succumb to Plague. Alys cried. She confessed she could save one, but only one of them. But unable to choose between the three, she saved none. Merlin could cure all three, he knew. He never told her.

They passed their ways after that. Merlin made Alys destroy any mention of him in her journals. He himself burned the one he had been writing into. He had probably done the same thing after the first time they met as well. After watching the children die, he knew he did not want to remember her. Not because of the guilt he had felt after letting them die. No. He simply feared what would have become of them had they grown to be too dependent on each other, for that would surely be the fate of the two beings too similar to each other.

Wanting to forget the woman as soon as possible, he decided to go insane. With the witch-hunts and burning witches at the stake as popular as ever, Merlin decided to give it a go and get himself executed. 63 times, 47 of them as a woman named Wendelin. Since the first few times were rather unpleasant, he developed a spell which froze the flames and left a nice tickling sensation on his skin. He briefly considered remaining a woman indefinitely, but after he got tired of burning at the stake and the period, he returned to his male body, albeit of the age of five. By that time he had successfully forgotten all about Alys, yet it mattered very little.

Still insane even over two centuries later, it took a very special someone to get him to his senses. That someone turned out to be a witch named Agnes.

He met her as a girl, still in a child's body himself, and she intrigued him so immensely that he decided to grow up with her. It took Merlin an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure out that she was a seer, and half of the time lived in a totally different century. She was peculiar and weird, and he, as a devoted insane person, felt he could never even hold a candle to her. He supposed she liked him as well, though it was hard to say for she was as wretched as they come. He followed her around her whole life, clapping and cheering her on in her madness, right up to about an hour before her death.

"I shall enchant the flames to freeze and hurt you not," he declared, chin raised up proudly, enjoying his superiority above his friend.

"Ye dare notte!" Agnes scrunched her nose, filling her petticoats with the gunpowder.

"Cometh heer, I need ye fille yt with nails also." She commanded and Merlin obeyed, stuffing her petticoats with thirty pounds of roofing nails. 

He observed from the hill near the village as she was tied, his ears enhanced by a simple spell, carrying her words toward him. "Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with such as theye do notte understande.” She looked up, and Merlin wondered, whether her stare and her words were meant for him, or for someone else, in some other time, that only she could see. "That goes for you as welle, yowe daft old foole.”

Merlin watched her explode together with the villagers gathered around her and decided that he was done with insanity. There was just no point in being mad anymore. He couldn't possibly hope to outdo Agnes.

Done with Europe, Merlin decided to visit America, which turned out to be even more of a mess. In his defence, he had no idea he would fell in love, marry and have a child in the very same century in which Agnes exploded. And yet, here he was, rocking his daughter to sleep in a little house in the middle of Salem, probably the most horrible town he had ever lived in. Not that he could say with certainty, just as he did not know whether he had had a child before.

"What shall we do, Will?" his wife whispered to him, fear in her eyes. "They will come for me, I know it. I do not want to burn, but if I resist and use my powers, they might come for Prudence as well."

Merlin looked at his beautiful wife and cursed the fate for having him fall for the witch doomed to flames so soon after Agnes.

"You will not burn and Prudence will be safe, I promise you."

The next day when the Witch Hunters came, Merlin used a spell to stupefy his wife and exchange places with her. Disguised as her he let them tie him and lit the flames underneath him. The fire did not hurt him, still, he put up a show for the cruel people in town and relished that everything was going according to plan. Until it was not. He did not count on his wife shaking off his spell and running to his rescue, not aware that no harm would come to him. His charade worked, but his wife died nevertheless in a meaningless attempt to save him. Having lost his wife and unable to look at his own daughter, he chose to abandon her and let the good neighbours raise her to be as normal as a witch could be.

The years had gone by, and Merlin enjoyed and cursed his life in equal measures. There were good and bad decades, but, sometime at the beginning of the 19th century, Merlin found himself reading through his latest journals and discovering that he was having quite a lot of fun the recent years.

He had pages and pages written about Newton, Zelpha, Halley, James Bradley, Yekaterina Dashkova and many others, and for the first time in a very long time felt the burning need for knowledge, to sink himself into a world of science and learn, meet and talk with enlightened people, uncover the mysteries of the world that were completely non-instinctual for him, unlike his magic. Merlin felt productive and the century had gone by quicker than any other.

Unlike as in his age of madness, he very seldomly used magic now, returning to his policy of relying on science to get him by. However, he did a spell or two every now and then. Mostly for fun, sometimes from frustration and for very selfish reasons as well. Once he even cursed a woman he had a skirmish with, something he had never done before. Not sure what exactly he did to her but knowing she would experience some form of discomfort sooner or later, he did not care to see the fallout. Years later he read of Typhoid Mary and decided that it would be for the best never to curse anyone again.

At first, Merlin assumed he would love the 20th century. The future started to look exciting what with the scientific advancements. And then the War came.

Merlin hardly ever now thought about King Arthur and his return. He reread his journals every now and then but believed not that the King would return, at least not any time soon. He hadn't up until then, why would he now? But the War was something else. Merlin stayed away from it, observing from distance, wishing that this was it. He presumed that he would somehow know once Arthur returned. After all, he was his destiny. But the King did not return, or Merlin simply didn't notice. The War ended, leaving Merlin disappointed.

And then another one came, almost immediately after the first one and Merlin was torn. Should he help people or silently observe again? In the end, he chose neither and made the biggest mistake in his life.

He busied himself, using all of his knowledge, as one of the scientists of the Manhattan Project. He came with no illusions, knowing exactly what they were trying to accomplish and proceeded with it anyway. All for the greater good, he declared, all to quicken Arthur's return. He didn't really give it much of a thought. When thousands of people died, it was already too late to think it through. And all for nought as well, for Arthur had still not returned. Cursing himself for succumbing to his hidden desires, Merlin swore off physics. Not forever, but just until he would forget and forgive himself, however long it would take. Instead of physics, he swore Hippocratic Oath and became a doctor.

During the Korean War, he was not hesitating to step up as a surgeon and tend to the wounded soldiers, getting for the first time in the modern era close to the war.

"You are a weird fellow, Amby," Hawkeye, a fellow surgeon, told to him once.

"Pot calling the kettle black?" chuckled Merlin, trying to darn one of his last pair of socks.

"Well, unlike you, kettle, this pot wants to get himself home. But you actually seem to want to be here. And not like Major Ferret Face over there who simply enjoys the symphony of grenades exploding throughout the night."

Merlin looked up at the said Major who was happily sleeping and wasn't bothered at all by Hawkeye placing a bucket of water by his bed. Yet. Merlin supposed that it would change once the prankster put the sleeping man's hand into the water. It was a bit childish but a good laugh nevertheless.

"Let's say this is my redemption," he shrugged and watched in anticipation as Hawkeye decided to give the plan 'the-Ferret-Face-wets-his-bed' a go.

A day after day, a month after month, a year after year, Merlin's redemption might have still not been done, but he started to forget. The Korean War had ended, and the time ran forward. The 20th century ended, and the 21th had begun. And Merlin, though still trying to redeem himself, found himself gravitating toward physics and other sciences again. There was still that thought at the back of his mind, that maybe this was it. Maybe, just maybe, Arthur would soon rise again, for the world seemed to be just one catastrophe shy of its greatest need. Merlin believed he would know once Arthur returned. Never did it occur to him, that the King could walk past him on the street and he would not notice. But he did. In the end, Merlin never noticed that his old friend was back.

**Author's Note:**

> The story will continue...


End file.
